Part Time Mac Software Tech/QA Job

I have some friends at a Mac software company (no, not the one you are assuming) who are looking for someone to do some part time TS and QA work. This position could grow into full time eventually but will not be right away.

It has been posted on Craigslist here:

http://minneapolis.craigslist.org/tch/126946308.html

If anyone from our group is interested they would come with a personal recommendation from me which would carry some weight.

The IT Crowd

Well, it’s not The Office, but it’s not a bad way to spend 23 minutes of your time. The first episode of a new show in the UK called The IT Crowd is available for download. It’s not entirely clear if they’ll post anything other than the premiere.

Plot Summary:

A couple of socially awkward geeks get handed a new manager who knows nothing about computers, but has aspirations toward corporate greatness. Hilarity ensues.

So Far So Good…

As many of you know my company is implemeting Active Directory and MS Exchange over the next month. We decided to contract First Tech Computer in Minneapolis to handle the migration from our NT4 domain to Active Directoy and setup/configure MS Exchange to handle our email and eventually our other collaboration efforts. I must say that I have been VERY happy with how it has gone so far. We are all setup and ready to go with some minor cleaning up to do with respects to our NT4 accounts and email accounts, lists, etc. Scott at First Tech has been amazing in not only the setup and configuration of both AD and Exchange, but with explaining himself along the way and making sure I’m involved with things I need to care about once he’s gone. I am also very happy with how Dantz Retrospect handles the backup of Exchange. We tested it out and it is really slick. I have to start getting in the mind set that everything will now reside on a server instead of our clients POP’ing there mail into the email client. It’s amazing to me that Retrospect can backup an individual mailbox and retrieve an individual message back out of the mailbox. Hopefully our users will not start being careless with respect to there email messages because I can see how this could suck up a lot of IT resources.

As we go along with the setup/migration I will keep you updated because I know a lot of people out there have opinions on Exchange and especially how it plays with the Mac. I too have read all the good and bad that people have to say. I will bring you an objective (as much as I can be) perspective of how it’s going and how it actually goes on D-Day (the weekend of Feb. 25th) when we actually go live.Bill Gates

That is all for now. I wonder which of the newly formed MS Companies handles Exchange. Does anyone know. I know MS broke up into three companies, one that handles the OS, one that handles XBox on peripherals and one that handles Office. Am I wrong on this?

A foreign film recommendation

Der Krieger und die Kaiserin is a fantastic contemporary German movie, directed by Tom Tykwer (Lola rennt), featuring the talented Franka Potente, as well as a great performance by Benno Fürmann. Both of them can also be seen in the bone-chilling thriller Anatomie. If you like this kind of recommendation, please let me know. I like foreign films and I’d be happy to post links to whatever I watched and liked.

Bodyworlds (Körperwelten) to come to the Science Museum

jumping_man.jpg The most controversial exhibit of the year will definitely be the Bodyworlds exhibit. Bound to be in the St. Paul Science Museum for the summer, it will surely raise some eyebrows and stimulate conversation. I was fortunate enough to catch this amazing display of human anatomy in Mannheim, Germany. I would consider it to be a life changing experience. Tickets supposedly go on sale early February and if it is anything like Germany, get ready for some serious waiting in line. But who knows, maybe the Midwest thinks very differently about this. IMHO, you don’t have to be a geek to appreciate this one. See you at the Science Museum – anybody know a good babysitter? ;)

iChat video chat kaput in OS X 10.4.4

All Mac Users got really excited when Apple introduced the encrypted iChats under OS X 10.4.4. Turns out, video chats are not too excited about this feature. Actually, they don’t even work at all – at least from what Grant and I can tell. Please note, this only occurs when being used between encrypted parties (on .Mac for example). Turn the security feature off (and restart the app, is this Windows or what?) and voilà, video chats are online again. Just in case you cared… Happy Unsecure Video Chats!

Chat to MSN in iChat with Jabber (this is sweet)

A buddy of mine pointed me to another blog where they tell you how to use Jabber in iChat to chat with MSN Messenger people. Now granted you can use a program like Adium which I use to chat with multiple clients, but this is through iChat dude! I would rather have the video chatting capabilities in iChat with other iChat clients then to load it in Adium and not have that capability. I wonder if I could then video chat with other clients? Hmmm, I’ll look into it. Check it out.